Second hand etc

Our overconsumption reaches new heights – we have so far not made our world justice. It’s not sustainable to throw away outrageous amounts of personal stash just because you find them unattractive or old. I mean; if it’s broke – well, I suppose you don’t have any other choice but to discard it and it’s of course natural to get bored by things you’ve owned a long time or that just has fallen out of fashion, but let’s face it;

Why throw away while you can give away?

Here in Sweden, we have two charity organizations called “The Red Cross”, and “The Antz”, or as it is called within our boundaries; “Myrorna”. Some of us Swedes “dump” our stash here, like old clothes, furniture and toys – this to be sold for a cheap amount of money to people who want them. Some things are even to be given away. If you feel like not spending big money on possessions and similar stuff, take a great ride to your nearest retailer and make yourself a good deal.

/ With love

GF (Arnold) and Frezd

AKA, Gustav and Fredrik

Muscle-cars and fitness

What is the coolest? Driving a big muscle car with a V8 engine, or driving a trendy, small, green, environmentally friendly car without any emissions? –The green car of course. How awesome isn’t it to drive a car that proves the industry wrong, that you don’t need to spend half your income on fuel? Or, if you want to be greener, go by bus. You can also walk or take the bike. It’s healthy and isn’t including any emissions, it’s definitely the best way to go. You stay fit and look cool, but don’t forget your helmet! But if you insist driving you dirty old fuel drinking vehicle, (Toyota Prius is an exception, it’s greener than your lawn!) collect you friends and car-pool.

Have you also thought of having one car in your family instead of two or three? Maybe some of you have like four cars in one family. Of course, a large family needs more vehicles, but have you consider that your parents also can take the bus to their jobs? They can also walk, run or bike. I guess that your parents would answer that they don’t have the time to walk or take the bike .But they can actually kill two birds with one rock, because they don’t need to go to the gym after work when they already had exercised on their way to and from work. An intense walk for 30 minutes burns 170 calories, that’s the same as a hard 15 minutes gym-pass and 34 grams of chocolate!

So be green, be healthy and fit!

Electric cars

Electric cars are good for the enviroment because they don't produce any carbon dioxide and since normal cars who runs on gasoline and diesel produce a lot it would be a great improvement! They are not just good for the enviorment, they also make a lot less noise than cars driven on fossil fuels which contributes to decreasing the overall noise in larger cities. Today the world is highly reliant on fossil fuels that one day will run out. So eventually we'll have to go over to alternative power sources and the sooner we do it the better.

Right now electric cars suffer from the technology of the day, the capacity of the batteries is limited and take a long time to charge. Unlike a gas driven car, you can't simply drive to a gas station and fill your tank because it would take too long. This means it's harder to drive distances longer than the battery time.

After all, you do need a car, because one can't simply walk into Mordor.

/Oscar, Kenny and Jesper

Recycling

Plastic and glass

One of the things that we recycle in Sweden is plastic. When we for example recycle bottles we get a reward by money. That is a good way to make more people to use it. At the same time that we got paid for it the companies got more material to work with and they can remake new bottles and other things where you use plastic. The process become more sustainable for our environment. We also recycle glass, like bottles. We sort the glass in two different containers depend on which color it is. You can choose between colored and colorless glass.

We also throw things away in containers. There we sort the plastic in different sections depend on which kind of plastic it is, soft plastic or hard plastic.

Cardboard

In Sweden we recycle cardboard and paper. You can for example submit your newspapers and other magazines. This rescues a lot of trees and is good for the environment.

Metal

We also recycle metal in form of cans, caps, tops of some kinds of cans and small things. In addition to that we recycle big things, like cars and airplanes. During that process we can save and extract materials like metal, plastic, glass and other dangerous substances like mercury. This is a good way to prevent dangerous emissions.

Mimmi and Johanna

Save water = save energy!

Close your eyes and imagine this scenario:

It’s early in the morning and you have been up late and worked on your school project the entire night. You feel like taking a hot shower to wake up and feel more alert. You use very hot water and you don’t turn the water off when shampooing your hair. After 20 minutes waste off hot water you step out of the shower.

Now, think about how much water you have used, and how much you could have saved if you had turned off the water every time you put products in your hair. In Sweden we are pretty good to reuse our water with the help of sewage treatment works, we don’t know how you do in Italy but that’s how we do in Sweden! Unfortunately, this takes a lot of energy and it would be much easier and we would save a lot more energy if you just turned off the water when you shower.

Turn off your water when you shower, fill up a pan with water when you do the dishes.

This is our suggestion for a little step forward to a happy world! :D

/Alida and Emma

Ecological Products

When you buy and consume ecological products in form of soaps and detergents, you prevent the discharge of dangerous chemicals into the environment. When you buy ecological, environmental-friendly products you can be sure that they have been produced without any unhealthy chemicals or materials. The product-letters that have been controlled and approved by a third, independent part are especially trustworthy.

Here in Sweden we have a lot of different types of product-letters, but only a few are trustworthy and approved by a third, independent part. Example given are “Svanen” (The swan mark) and “Bra Miljöval”(Good environmental choice).

/Katarina and Malin

Windmills

There are a couple of projects in the northern parts of Sweden; the biggest one is outside of Piteå. It’s a good method, but not the best place to build it on, because we have enough power sources up here already, it can seem like a bit of waste of resources. The reasons to why it’s not so great is mainly because of the waste of energy when we transport it to the parts that need it, but windmills are a great energy source because it doesn’t pollute and it can provide a good deal of energy. So they should build more windmills, but only where we need more energy. However windmills are a better source than the sun, we need more windmills but not in the northern part.

We have a proposal that you can go together with people in your neighborhood and build a small windmill and distribute energy equally between the people like a big jolly family. That would make the world a better place and if more people did like that we wouldn’t need a lot of investors to build huge parks of windmills. This could make it cheaper to buy electricity for everyone.

We believe the world is important and the energy resources are limited so we need to invest in things such as windmills.

The Vikings - over and out.

Joel, Anton and Isak.

Locally produced and seasonal food

We try to buy a lot of food which is produced near us. For example, we buy dairy products from a dairy located in Luleå instead of a dairy in the south of Sweden. This is very good for the environment because there is less transport emission. This is because the transport is so much shorter than if the dairy products were to be transported from the south of Sweden. This makes sense, right? One week every term our school buys only locally produced products. This is a good thing but it would be even better if they bought locally produced food more often. The diary products are always locally produced and that is very very good.

Another thing we try think about is to buy vegetables and fruits according to season. For example, during winter we have a lot of snow and well, obviously, it does not grow a lot here then. So if we buy strawberries during winter (which would feel terribly wrong since most Swedes considers it as a summer thing) the strawberries would have been transported from a country far away, like Spain for example. But during summer we have strawberries everywhere and they are so delicious. It would not be an option to buy Spanish strawberries for us then. Not only because of the environmental issues but because the Swedish strawberries are fantastic!

Amanda and Denise